An emerging voice in local literature, Elmer Omar Bascos Pizo translates his feelings into his poetry, reinterpreting his life experiences and working diligently to maintain authenticity. His poems are uniquely provocative, often sad in depicting his journey from an abusive childhood in the Philippines, through the trials of an overseas Filipino worker enduring and witnessing injustice and torture in the Middle East, to the challenges of a hard-working immigrant in 21st-century Hawai‘i. This is an important collection that offers a glimpse into a life of laboring to survive. Sometimes self-deprecating and occasionally humorous, Pizo’s distinctive poetry affirms the redemption found in the small sparks of humanity.

THE NANJING MASSACRE: POEMS offers us a series of snapshots of human cruelty, courage, and compassion that together compose a frightening yet accurate and unforgettable portrait of a historical nightmare. Like Goya’s prints in DISASTERS OF WAR, or Ian MacMillan’s prose sketches in PROUD MONSTER, Wing Tek Lum’s poems confront readers with fully realized vignettes of brutality, love, and suffering whose effect is cumulative.

The subject is the notorious Japanese occupation of Nanjing, China, in 1937. The poems capture all perspectives of the tragedy—from the weary, casually cruel Japanese soldiers to the uncomprehending child victims, and from the desperate helpless parents and the brutalized comfort women to the bloodless yet vicious bureaucrats of death.

“Too often history is written by those who survive, those who won,” Lum writes. Drawing on published histories, memoirs, photographic collections, and oral histories, he composes testimony after testimony for the silenced—poetic memorials that also provide some measure of revenge against the victors. At key moments, he also broadens the frame of reference, linking the crimes in China to the atrocities committed since then at different times, on different continents. Massacres, Lum suggests, bear a family resemblance—the human family.

‘EWA WHICH WAY is a coming-of-age novel set in the early 1980s, around the time of Hurricane ‘Iwa. The DeSilva family, in economic straits, has suffered the setback of having to move from town to ‘Ewa Beach, and the dissonance between parents impacts the lives of their young sons, Landon and Luke. In addition to humorous moments depicting growing up local, Portuguese, and Catholic, there are serious under-lying themes regarding religion, ethnic tensions, assimilation issues, domestic violence, and the reality that children sometimes need to find their own way in the world at a very young age. With problems in the home and at school, the two brothers are forced to find ways to survive. The economic, ethnic, and family violence issues dominating their lives make for provocative reading relevant to similar contemporary issues of today.

This publication was made possible with support from the Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts (MOCA) and the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts (SFCA), through appropriations from the Hawai‘i State Legislature (and by the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA]).